From a purely business perspective many of the SEO techniques described as ’spam’ don’t actually seem that ‘bad.’ Particularly if you have a new site, dragging your pages up through the rankings can take months of hard work. If you’ve got a product you know your customers will want, why shouldn’t they be made aware of it through the quickest channels possible?
There are quite a few SEO companies around who share this point of view. It can lead you to the question, why on earth is SEO spam so bad? It has to do with the nature of SEO itself.
Search engine optimisation is the deliberate manipulation of the search engines. As such, it treads on delicate ground indeed with the search engines themselves. SEO experts benefit from a fairly friendly relationship with the search engines, but every new spam technique uncovered leads to a deterioration of that relationship. The abuse of approved techniques leads to further restrictions on what sites can do, making things harder for everyone.
The relationship between SEO experts and search engines isn’t a concern of the average business, nor should it be. The influence of spam on the industry, however, is another story. This can affect not only the way SEO works on your site, but the average user’s perception of a site that has signs of SEO. If SEO is perceived as a bad thing, every time a user detects your keywords within your content, an automatically bad image is projected, affecting the user’s perception of your business as a whole.
Most businesses aim to establish a genuine connection with their site’s users. Ultimately, spammy search engine optimisation won’t achieve this. Bad SEO is usually very visible to the average site user. Internet users are already quite cynical about the way in which businesses attempt to manipulate through marketing. Internet users who land on your site to see signs that you have badly manipulated their search engine results won’t be best pleased. The net result is a higher ranking, but a higher bounce rate as well, something a smart business simply doesn’t want.
Bad SEO practitioners are even more troublesome for the industry than individual site owners who use dubious SEO techniques, as SEO practitioners have some influence in shaping the industry. For every SEO expert who uses a bad technique, there are large numbers of clients that are led to believe that those techniques are perfectly fine.
Stringing your keywords in a near-invisible line, paying for links or organising reciprocal schemes are tempting when you want a swift result. There are a lot of spammy techniques that might even go unnoticed, if none of your competitors spot them and report you. If your site isn’t full of spam itself, the attitude to search engine optimisation spam simply doesn’t seem so bad in the scheme of things. However, any spam you feature on your site can have local and far-reaching effects. Talk to our experts at SEO Consult about ethical SEO practice.
Related posts:
- Is the SEO industry doomed?
- Avoiding Wiki-Spam for SEO
- SEO: Tricky Techniques, But Still Spam
- The Big, Scary World of SEO Penalties
- SEO: Tips to Land Tricky Diggs
Tags: Bad SEO practitioners, competitors, manipulation, SEO Companies, Spam
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